8/27/2013

Studying War Some More

Studying War Some More:
It's really one of the most nauseating things the Rude Pundit has read in quite a while. In the late 1980s, the United States, then under the "leadership" of Saint Ronald Reagan, grand puppet figurehead that he was, shared intelligence with Saddam Hussein's regime so that Iraq could attack Iran with chemical weapons. This comes from CIA documents and interviews with officials. To quote the Foreign Policy article on this, "They show that senior U.S. officials were being regularly informed about the scale of the nerve gas attacks. They are tantamount to an official American admission of complicity in some of the most gruesome chemical weapons attacks ever launched." U.S. intelligence "was authorized to give the Iraqi intelligence services as much detailed information as was available about the deployments and movements of all Iranian combat units." Reagan himself came out of his Alzheimer's haze to sign off on doing so out of fear that Iran might gain an advantage in its war with Iraq. Again, all involved knew this meant that Iraq would use chemical weapons, and that even extended to their use in the Kurdish area of northern Iraq.

If we even begin to honestly grapple with what this means, we would have to rewrite the history of the last three decades of American history. First we'd have to drag Reagan's bones out of the ground and skull fuck him in front of weeping true believers. We'd have to halt our sentimental glorification of old, old George Bush, Sr., Reagan's vice, who used Iraq's threat of chemical weapon attacks on Kuwait as justification for the Persian Gulf War. And just think about every time George W. Bush invoked Saddam's use of sarin gas or other weapons. Those occurred, in part, because the United States helped it happen. And can we just throw Donald Rumsfeld into the middle of the ocean, just on principle? And toss Dick Cheney on top of him?

We are a nation that has been led by war criminals. Hell, they even worried a little bit about that in those CIA files.

Once again, once again, we're in the position of now Knowing For Sure what we knew but didn't have confirmed. We knew that, when Bush, Sr. threatened Iraq if it used chemical weapons, it was the height of hypocrisy. But we didn't Know. And, as ever, we won't change our history and we won't do anything about it.

Once again, once again, history proves that, when it comes to war, the doves are nearly always right and the hawks are nearly always wrong.

So we're poised, one more time, on that awful precipice, being told that we must intervene in a nation in order to punish its government for the use of chemical weapons. On Syria, we're told, the U.S. and its allies will launch three days of "targeted" strikes against the forces of Bashar al-Assad. No one believes that the strikes will really do anything to end the civil war there. The New York Times makes the bizarre case that President Obama better do something because he said he had drawn a red line on Syria. In other words, we need to kill a bunch of people so that Obama is as good as his word? This is a masturbatory exercise, at best. If we want to stop atrocities in the world, there's a hell of a lot more we could do than bomb the fuck out of another place.

Sadly, we have reached that point where the slavering war dogs are drooling at the prospect of this next pile of meat. And, no matter the consequences, they will not be denied.

And here's what should bug you, hawk or dove. Just a few brief years ago, Syria was a strange ally in the idiotic War on Terror, torturing people for us so that we could keep our hands free of direct blood spatters. What's going to come out in documents 25 years from now about our complicity in this current barbarism?

Don't worry, though. If there's one thing we do right in America, it's denialism.